SUSE 9.3: More, Better, Faster, Now! - page 5

Cutting Edge and Oh, So Stable

May 16, 2005

By
Bill von Hagen

Though I am extremely happy with SUSE 9.3, this rose is not without a
thorn or two. One bizarre problem that I noted with SUSE 9.3 is that
modifying the display resolution on both my Desktop system and in
VMware caused SUSE to switch to the generic X Window system
display/login manager, xdm, from its usual default of the KDE display
manager, kdm. At first, I thought I was the victim of some remote time
travel exploit, but this happened on both of my clean installs so I
guess it's a bug. This was easy enough to fix by entering the Control
Center's YaST2 Modules pane, selecting System, and selecting
/etc/sysconfig Editor. After authenticating (unless you're already
root), you can then expand the Desktop and Display manager selectors.
You must then set DISPLAYMANAGER back to kdm (or to gdm if you prefer
that display manager and have installed GNOME). You may want to modify
this area in general, since SUSE 9.3 continues SUSE 9.2's insistence
on prohibiting remote X clients from displaying on your system unless
you set both DISPLAYMANAGER_REMOTE_ACCESS and
DISPLAYMANAGER_SERVER_TCP_PORT_6000_OPEN to "yes."

After making these
tweaks and restarting X on your system, you'll get the "right" display
manager and you'll also be able to display xterms (or any other X
client) from a remote system. Even after installing all of the
available updates (as discussed in the previous section of this
review), the problem still persisted and was repeatable. Caveat User.

I also noticed that, at least in VMware, my clean SUSE 9.3
installation was surprisingly hesitant to shut down, even when told to
do so. While I found this touching (it's like it doesn't want to
leave), it is irritating to have to tell it to turn off the computer
twice. Perhaps this is another VMware thing--I didn't see this
problem on my updates or in a clean install on physical hardware.

As shipped, SUSE's KDE 3.4 activated some irritating bells and
whistles that I was compelled to disable. By default, mousing over
anything in the panel displays a relatively large graphical tool tip
that tells you what you're mousing over. Oddly enough, I already knew
where my cursor was, and thus found this to be visually irritating and
a probable waste of a few cycles. Turning this off was easy enough to
do and actually quite intuitive. In the Control Center, I selected
Desktop > Panels, and disabled the "Enable icon mouse-over effects" and
all was well by my standards.